The present invention is a computer software method for enumerating pages of data in a stateless, distributed environment, and more specifically the invention allows a user to easily navigate through a large collection of data objects.
Enterprise-wide computing systems are often distributed computing systems, that is systems of individual computers, typically dispersed geographically across many separate office locations, linked together via a network to pass data and commands. A client/server arrangement is one way of implementing a distributed computing system. In a client/server arrangement, the server computer provides a service, for example reading and writing data in a database, to its client computer. Typically, the client computer calls the server computer and requests that an application or function be executed. During the session of the call, the client and server computers are said to share “state,” that is the data and commands passed between the client and server have a context or state of being based upon the particular instance of service being provided to the client by the server. In a stateless distributed computing system, client and server computers maintain little or no state between calls, which works well for small, discrete transactions but poses problems when a client requests large data sets from a server. For example, the client could retrieve all of the desired data comprising a large data set from the server in a single call, but a user accessing the client computer would have to wait for the entire data set to be gathered and transmitted. Depending upon the size of the data set, for example a customer list for a major corporation, the wait time can be prohibitive. Alternatively, the client could manage context information between successive calls to the server. However, the server, being stateless, would have to rebuild the entire data set for each successive call and then search for the next subset of data to return to the client, which is inefficient and results in response delays. The present invention addresses the need for a data structure to allow clients to efficiently access large data sets from servers in a stateless, distributed computing environment.